Work Text:
❦
Never one for fashion but always prowling just out of sight, enmeshed in her near-blind spots at her five and seven, the corners of his mouth actually pull down into a frown.
It’s garish, ugly, gold without its shine. Saffron without its luster. Clashes with her pink hair and appears to him —
(though apparently not enough to the rest of the world as he sets his drink down with a heavy sound of displeasure, channeling unwarranted fury through the teetering table and upsetting everyone else’s imbibing glasses and chill vibe, earning irked expressions and even a holler from Kiba whose tongue starts wagging about the spill, party foooul, Uchiha! and he wishes he’d just for once in his life take a knee, don a muzzle,)
— to be craven semaphore bobbing in the dark sea of the dance floor, catching the light in a flippant way no nicer than giving him a crude gesture.
In the language of flowers, he’s so very sure Sakura is telling him to fuck right off.
If Ino knew her plan was working so spectacularly her smug high would last for weeks on end. As it stands, she’s still deep in coquettish nothings with a plain and humdrum nobody who’s at the dying edge of the acceptable age for this tavern, trolling for kunoichi nearly half his age. Something to play with, nothing she particularly minds, but a flicker of her eyes toward her best friend suggests they must move on.
“Ladies’ room,” she twinkles, departing with a waggle of her fingers and easing her arm into Sakura’s before it can be fashioned into a violent weapon.
“You have no grace, do you? Don’t you want to make him jealous?”
Sakura grumbles under her breath, draining her glass and leaving it on a passing table.
Pursing her lips, Ino leans in plush, head close.
“What was wrong with that one, anyway?”
“Insipid, braggart, a total lush I’d have to carry home.”
“Not everyone can drink like a fish, Sakura, and even less are interesting. That’s why I’m trying to piss off your lover. Start a fire. Make him make a move.”
“He doesn’t care,” Sakura pouts, lips in a sharp twist.
“I think that’s what he’d like you to think,” Ino sighs, “but even Sasuke’s not so frigid.”
“Everybody here is annoying. I don’t know why I let you drag me out here at all to bat my lashes and pretend the off-duty men have something worth bragging about.”
The rest of her insults are much more colorful and much less audible. Slapping her powerful hands down on the counter tears a shiver from each bartender like rattling one’s soul loose. Sidling up to her again, supple and tipsy, Ino watches her askew and taps Sakura’s dangling earring in the dim light, watching it flicker and flash.
“You’re so cranky when you don’t get fucked.” Says this in undertone, managing it through gleaming white teeth as she puts up two fingers and points at Sakura’s glass. “I’ll need to solve this for both our sakes. Don’t drink all tha — okay — do whatever you want.”
Sakura sends the empty glass skittering across the wood back to the bartender with a flick of her wrist, putting up another finger.
“At your six.”
“What?”
“Those eyes are burning coal holes into your bare back right now, forehead. This dress was a no-brainer. You’re welcome.”
And with that, she flicks the iridescent earring again affectionately and sails away with both drinks in tow.
He comes up on her as an animal crashing through undergrowth, lacking all of his usual poise; in response she shows him her sharp chin the moment he leans on the bar and tries to catch her eye.
“You’re here.”
“You knew I would be.”
“What’s this?”
“Oh, so now after your pride’s hurt, you’d like to talk to me. How gallant of you, after your drama.”
Ino scooping both glasses up on her way out ensures that he’ll have to remedy Sakura’s lack of drink once he gets over his angry, petulant fit and mausoleum silent treatment after the single blind date that started this whole sordid, semipublic battle of wills.
Sakura starts to raise a hand and signal the scattered, overburdened bartender, but Sasuke leans in front of her to usurp the request.
Eyes pinging between both of their flushed faces, he nods to no one and ducks behind the counter; he’s privy to the gossip and sort of terrified of them both — two legendary shinobi well on their sloshed way to having yet another public display of potent and intense attraction masquerading as a petty disagreement.
An hour turns over somewhere in this tavern without visible clocks, the shift from pleasant evening to rowdy shinobi off mission dispatch. From here the din always climbs louder, the music soars warbling and vibrato and gives an ulcer to anyone over thirty. Spills end up on the floor more than in mouths, failing to slake any thirst since by this time people begin to find it in drunk strangers or friends waiting in the wings.
Such is the way in this watering hole, off the beaten track, a first choice if you’re wanting to hide your poor and drunk ones.
Sakura’s eyes deepen in shade at the advent of the first note. Doesn’t matter what it is, and as she accepts another drink with reluctance Sasuke asks rudely, again, “What is that?”
“Don’t you like it?” Showing him her cheek to better flash the ruddy yellow flower perched behind her ear, the colors in discord; he tastes sour hate on his tongue, and it’s not the drink. “Ino dressed me tonight.”
To this he only snorts, meaning obviously. Knowing Ino tends to be behind most bright and terrible ideas that involve his . . . teammate.
“Good thing,” Sakura says tartly, “I don’t care what you think.”
“That much is obvious.”
Glass hits the wooden bar so hard it certainly cracks. The bar, not the glass. Somewhere, a bartender winces; across the floor at a boisterous table, two blondes are watching them, practically leering.
When Sakura turns to face him in full, rouge simmering through the skin of her cheeks, his gaze follows each divinely formed bone in her sternum only to disappear into implicating shadows unknown.
He catches her eyes skimming his shoulders, the muscles of his chest she can’t see at the moment.
“I went on one date.”
“A blind date.”
“You’d rather it was someone you knew? To approve or disapprove? Temari, Kakashi, Naruto?”
Sasuke’s lips pull again, eyes glittering with danger and showing just what he thinks of her listed choices. “Speaking of that idiot—”
“Yes, he knew, and I assume that’s how you found out so you could show up to publicly make an ass of yourself. Because Naruto,” and here she takes a generous gulp, “can’t keep his dumb mouth shut.”
“You told him first.”
Slips from his lips before he can cage it, take it back. The admission lingers between them, all tense indignation and hot carnal skin with the chintzy flower casting a specter, an odd pall over the proceedings.
“You’re upset I didn’t talk to you first?” Sakura purses her lips, waffling between emotions. “After all these months you’ve had to talk to me. I had to do something. I can’t wait around for someone who’s not interested.”
“Ino’s idea?” he hisses, unforgiving as a kunai slice to the skin. “The date, the dress, coming here tonight, this — this?” Stares at the ugly flower, stares at her.
“Yes, you know Sasuke,” — the drop of the suffix is palpable, its immediate absence felt as a lost organ, a missing limb — “it was. Because I’ve been pining and hoping and us pretending we weren't interested wasn’t doing us any favors. For you, for me, for people that care.”
“It’s not about them.”
“You’re right,” she says. Something fierce in her eyes, glass apt to burst in her strong, vibrating fingers. “Because it’s nothing. You’ve made that clear.”
Before he can find anything to say she’s draining the rest, tipping the dregs down the beautiful column of her throat. A liquid thread escapes and winds its way against her hot skin, a thin river that in a burst of arousal and heat he thinks of capturing and tasting with his tongue. As it stands, he’s just a stupid mute, drink in hand, and watches it travel with his eyes instead until she returns to earth.
Plucking the flower from her hair she holds it in between her thumb and index, twirling it in her hands, forming careful words he strains to hear over the rising music.
“If I’d told you and you let me go on the date without a word, I couldn’t handle it. Because if you said nothing . . . that would be it.”
Still moving the flower stem in her fingers, keeping her eyes on him in the way of hypnosis, charming a snake.
“The tansy, when presented to another, can symbolize hope for good health.” And now she crushes it in her fingers, ruddy yellow daubing itself into her skin, threatening in its varnish. “But she also told me it has another possible meaning, associated with hostile thoughts.”
“Sakura—”
Curling it into her grip, cradle and crush, she unfurls the weedy mess and drops it into his unfinished glass.
“‘Unofficial declaration of war,’” she quotes, sweeping past him in tempest fashion and heading for the sloppy dance floor.
Sakura pauses at the edge as a climber stands at the precipice, stares at Sasuke over her shoulder with eyes like two sea glass fragments digging under the skin, invasive, not unlike the species sloughing its own ugly petals off in his drink.
Funny, but not really, how he remembers that species detail out of all the others from some dinner just a week or so ago, in which he was closed off, tangled up in his own head, avoidant of the strange flirting that had sprung up between their two blonde friends recently, forgetting to take the temperature of his own confusing situation.
Her expression before she disappears into the roiling dark saying,
Let’s see if you win.
.
.
.
Two minutes too late he realizes he hates dancing, hates all these bodies, but loves her.
But he’ll find her in this sordid mess of drunken swaying and now it’s the game of pursuit, for even without the florid beacon of the war-tansy he can still spot her by the beloved pink of her hair.
Adding in the fact that her dangling earrings catch and snatch the errant flickers of light, radiating in the dark, he wonders if it’s all a come-hither, a proving ritual. He’d thought crashing her date, without subtlety and with Naruto in tow, would be an obvious statement of how he’d felt about it. Kakashi had raised his eyebrows wordlessly when he’d heard (not from them, of course, but after the story was passed through three other jounin, finally landing in his lap courtesy of Gai); Tsunade was overheard snorting drink through her nose and all over her desk full of paperwork, the news having arrived from Ino to Shikamaru to a couple more inner circle shinobi before coming to her office on Shizune’s lips; about twenty people had witnessed the scene in the cafe and surely, the jilted blind date was telling everyone he knew, albeit fumbling with the details of how gallant he was when in reality he’d tucked tail and ran when all three next-gen Sannin were in the same room, about to turn the coffee house into debris.
There.
Drink refreshed, a hand on his arm. She sways while speaking to the stranger with a wry smile as if to bring him along, rock him as a boat to the beat. Leaning in close, to be heard over the music of course, but that doesn’t stop the peppery, violent flare of anger uncoiling from the top of his head and bubbling up a sneer on his lips, a clenching in his stomach, heat in his groin.
Folded together close in a table wedged into a dim corner, Ino’s laughing and spilling good booze while Naruto lets out a whoop of solidarity as Sasuke starts prowling, parting and peeling apart bodies stuck together with the music. Ino’s elbow upends Kiba’s full glass into his lap.
One of so few benefits of being a former international criminal, one third triumvirate of an infamous team, and saving the world: He’s a frightening, recognizable man. Sensing his approach Sakura detaches from the stranger and slides away into another sliver of the dark, eyes bright and leaving sunspot afterimages as she goes.
Could be all the drink; could be all the heady jealousy.
Sasuke changes direction, edging apart another couple and ignoring their exclamations absorbed into the music.
Against a wall, heads inclined, the way she laughs. His soul shudders and he blinks back his momentary violation of the rules, as there’s no tolerance for special abilities or bothering others with your prowess. Safe space, if you will, for shinobi to pretend they’re something human. Something average, a state weapon capable of uncomplicated love.
Seeking again, she flits away. Slipping as silk, the way she does when they’re on a cold streak of undefinition, passing one another as ships in the night on their respective, harrowing missions full of unmentionables. No wonder, then, that their love is knotty, sticks in the throat. He, with so few words already, fails miserably when she begs for some sort of response and affirmation.
This time she lets him approach — it could go on all night, this pursuit.
As always, the skirmish is brilliant, fervent, sparkling.
When he comes up on her and this stranger, towering over them both, he’s sure the latter’s soul has left the building. Amusing, in a way, when Sasuke’s own mind snipes at him, points out how deeply his own is ensnared.
She beams up at him, unafraid. “I’ve been wondering where you are. Would you like to meet—”
“No.”
She sighs, faux-wistful. “Goodnight then, stranger.”
A shinobi off duty at least five years her senior. Sasuke’s seen his face before but commits it to memory with the same intensity and drive as a sculptor of historical figures. It’ll never be forgotten, and he’s sure the stranger will tell his equally dumb friends about how he bravely stood up for a girl’s tender heart when in reality, he thought his heart would stop right there on that dance floor.
Stranger scurries away, and Sasuke looms over Sakura with his arm against the wall. If she’s crowded by the way he presses close, angling his handsome, sovereign nose down at her trying to parse her expression, she doesn’t show it. On the contrary, her hand drifts up to his shirt collar and smooths it down, taps his buttons one by one, and she looks away to the mass of bodies with a bit of extra color in her face that he glimpses only in passing slivers of light.
“He’ll be talking, especially with you this close to me.”
“Let them.”
“Where have you been?”
“In my head.”
Another admission he’s said without thinking, the heart dropping revelations loosened and loved by drink and jealousy.
“You embarrassed me, you know,” she says, so quiet, under the music. “Angry, sure — but it was also pretty humiliating.”
His murmur sounds like I’m sorry, blending in with the noise.
“People talk enough about us. All three of us, and especially us. ”
I’m trying. Words lost. Trapped in my head . . . I don’t give enough.
“I’m not going to get an answer out of you tonight,” she says. “I don’t want it like this. We’re not even sober.”
Vision daubing at the edges, watercolors — he kisses her hair.
“I don’t like that flower,” he finally says, voice coming back.
“You’re bothered by strange things.”
“Why are we both here tonight, Sakura?”
“Why you came, I don’t know,” she says, shivering under his touch. His hand’s wandering now, tracing the deep fabric v forming the beautiful view of her collarbone, sternum, peekaboo breast. “To drown your woes, forget me, who can say? It’s hard to tell what you’re thinking sometimes.”
Reverence, in the way his fingers begin again where her neck meets the collar meets gooseflesh even in the stifling heat meets the muscle where her ribs end and a taut stomach begins. What’s winning, what’s losing in her declaration of war?
She takes his hand, breaks the surface tension to tug him toward the mess and shadow.
So he goes.
Naruto and Ino link arms before downing the next shot, intertwined properly in their glee as messy abettors watching messier lovers are wont to do.
Inebriating roil and roll.
Sasuke wouldn’t consider this dancing, this slow and sinuous undulating to an underwater rhythm; at this gritty twilight hour with people loose and lush on one another, slush and secret whispers. All he knows is the dark and the way her head’s tucked under his chin with one arm slung back around his neck, the swaying song of her hips guiding his into unknown territory.
Though not so unknown, if he’s honest, if he admits that they’ve been messing around, chaotic manifest, orchestration of gravity with an inability to be severed. A preserved and poignant moment is arriving.
Fruit and salt — he inhales deeply, greedy for her scent. A fine gloss of perspiration stippling all visible skin; feels it against his shirt, suffocating between them; sees it, delicate and winsome and slick down the front of her, shimmering between unreal dimensions not unlike the earrings.
I’m sorry.
Shhh. Tilting her head back onto his shoulder now, eyes closed, raking brightpaint fingernails through his hair.
I am; it was thoughtless.
I know.
Time loses structure. Finally they feel invisible, lacking all fine lines and etching. The only things that matter are staying upright, remembering to breathe, and the way her hips lean and roll and break into another lower, darker layer of his being.
And the way he doesn’t resist, meets them in the tranquil wave with a harmony that’s bringing her in too close to the things that make him weak.
Words trapped between hair and the pinna of the ear, circling the drain, his hand disobeying everything he means to say while it again touches those fabric edges, fingers fanning over the slick space between her breasts because if he lets go she’ll fall apart, or is it him, already doing so,
I love you.
Please don’t—
I do.
I’m just here to dance.
His hand grips her hip, provokes an unexpected shudder of delight. Quick breath. Their swaying continues tender still: Love revolves in place on this single point of contact but the climb is evident, clawing, twining. An hour and a day.
Aggravation, rankling, skewers through his arousal in a sharp instant as he thinks of the tawdry tansy, how it rang brassy against her spring hair. But the stronger cacophony: Music drowning them both and dripping from thin fabrics atoms oscillating edges dappling as paint and the beat, the beat, the beat —
All she manages when he starts murmuring are susurrating hushes; they quiet as he kisses her ear, full, tracing his tongue in the pinna curve and on. She fists his hair in one hand and fabric in the other, gripping his pant leg as if ready to be thrown overboard.
His hand comes up to rest, but not close around, the lovely column of her throat.
Naruto, asleep on his arm, opens his bleary gaze into a puddle of gin.
“I think it worked,” Ino cackles, lying her head on the table in mirror image to behold him, eyes bright.
Sasuke’s pulling her and she hangs on through the dark hallway, cutting off circulation to his fingers. Shoulders and elbows used wisely and fleeting recognition and fear parting their way, shifting strangers around them, receding as water and swallowing the beaten path up again. These breakaways are not unusual, politely ignored, and in the best of times one pretends they’ve never seen anyone sneak out the back.
Mercifully the alley is deserted but it’s pure luck, and perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered, the way they’re dazed and gasping already before they’ve even touched again and there’s not much waiting left in either of them; she’s pulling at his hair and then his top buttons, shearing two from the fabric in haste and abandoning it for his zipper instead, taking him out, wrapping her fingers around his length and for just that second he pauses in kissing her, a noise caught in the apple of his throat that vibrates in hers; already hard, needs little further work from her so he presses her against the brick, so deep in her throat with his tongue that he may pull her fucking soul out in this gritty place behind this wayward bar.
Grips her thigh, gives it an impatient slap and when he scoops her hips up with his entire arm she obliges, hooking her legs on his waist and fumbling, desperate, messy hands between them thank gods for the grace of this wall as leverage, how many messes have done this out here, under stars, against this scraping hot brick,
oh, her whining, it feels shameless and needy and unintelligible but he knows and he’s guilty and it’s always a half-second too late, with her needs he always feels a fraction of a step behind, chasing and racing to catch up to all the years he lost, lost time he could have learned her and gods what a stupid metaphor,
and they manage it, shaking and clinging with that tiny strip of soaked fabric out of the way and he sinks into her, tearing even needier and more cloying music from them both but luxuriant in its tone because they know this’ll be quick under the influence and lacking any discipline for teasing, floating in the alcoholic heat and haze,
and it’s almost maudlin; if it wasn’t filthy, call it sweet. Less pump more roll in the muse of a small boat rocking, hugging and molding to the swell and fall of sea. Heading there together in some sentimental canter, drawing out the build as long as possible, hurry up and linger low in the shared heat they’ve so missed.
Sakura shatters a blip-second before him, backskin scraped and legs trembling and mouth partly open,
but it’s Sasuke who speaks and it’s just her name, once, sotto voce and devout in his admission in his telling of the night.
.
.
.
Last call leaves Ino plying Naruto and Kiba from stickygin chairs, badgering Shino to take the latter home. In the awkward midst of his silent compliance, she turns and suddenly feels significantly more sober, charged with glee, as Sakura emerges from the dim dance floor with Sasuke close behind.
“He couldn’t keep up.” Ino indicates a snoring Naruto, dribble draining from the corner of his lip.
She’s about to hand him to Sakura — bless her inhuman strength — until she catches the tremble in her knees, the shimmer in her skin. Smiles indulgently, a cat with a trapped canary, and heaves their third teammate to Sasuke instead.
He catches his dumb friend in good reflex, perhaps expecting it.
“Were you both on the dance floor all this time?” Ino asks.
A pause.
Sasuke busies himself with distributing Naruto’s weight, leaving Sakura to attempt weak lies in a raspy, spent voice.
“I mean — we weren’t together the whole time—I spotted a friend— ”
“Uh-huh. Sure. It’s closing time.”
“I just wanted to dance,” Sakura bristles, reddening.
“I bet you did. Walk me home, why don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, Ino slides her arm into Sakura’s and drags her toward the exit, flicking her swaying earring and already jabbering a mile a minute in her ear like an interrogation.
He follows them out with Naruto in tow, keeping a respectful distance behind, and they turn down opposite bends in the street and away.
Chancing a glance over Naruto’s hair, Sasuke watches her passing under streetlights and notes the way she doesn’t look back.
A single daffodil is the first thing she registers after two hours of twilight gossip and twelve hours of sleep lasting well into midday. Passing the back of her hands over eyes, she blinks a few times. Pristine, resting in a thin vase in the middle of her coffee table, and —
Ow!
Startling, she elbows the door frame and mutters under her breath when she recognizes Sasuke on her couch. She rubs away the expectant beginnings of a bruise and clears her throat.
“Who let you in?”
He opens one eye.
“Of course you’re not asleep,” she sighs.
Sasuke tips his chin at the set of keys on the table. “I’ve had them for a while. You gave me an extra.”
She can’t quite argue with the truth, and instead stomps around the table, giving the single flower a wide and hesitant berth before flopping on the other end of the couch, arms folded.
Lets out a loud huff.
“So what,” she says in the silence, “you’re giving them back?”
“I’d rather not. Though that’s up to you.”
“I don’t want it to be up to me.”
Sasuke doesn’t respond to that. Luckily, Sakura’s temper sweeps in to fill the pause.
“If this is some sort of joke, it’s mean,” she frowns, leaning forward to tenderly finger one of the petals. “Where did you get it?”
“Ino, obviously,” he says, sounding tart. “She’s annoyed with me for bothering her so early. As for this being a joke, I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“What’s this for?”
“Some flowers don’t suit you; this one does. And if you’re implying I’ve forgotten, I would hope you don’t think that about me.”
A thickness threading his voice near the end, and then he adds, quieter,
“I don’t forget the harm I’ve done.”
He can’t understand what she says through her wobbly undertone, unsure if the tears are joyful or hurt. He supposes he’ll learn.
“Sometimes I need to be told. I need to hear it from you. That you want me. It’s hard living in ‘what if’s.’ I don’t want to keep waiting and needing and then one of these missions goes wrong. And then we have nothing. And then . . . there’s no option at all.”
Sasuke turns to her, tries this open and honest language of the body, an attempt to convey all the things he misses, the words that so often fail to come.
“It’s you, Sakura. It’s always been you.”
Another pause, the universe vibrating tense and taut.
“S-Sasuke-kun—”
“I’ll have to say it more. I know.”
“You . . . said quite a lot last night.”
He scowls, embarrassed, but she’s beaming, scoots closer until their knees are touching, fingers seeking refuge in his mussed hair and his lips touch hers with this last hushed confession,
Let me start over. Let me try.
Kissing in the view of spring, beginning again.