#who watch and report her progress to the goddess of sin herself

[chicxibalba]

daily ciaran

[spield]

journey to i - kakasaku

Author’s Notes: This has been in my google docs for so long, I’ve forgotten all about it. I low-key panicked when I couldn’t find it my files hahaha. But here it is. Not much romance, but more of... hmm, you tell me what you think it is in your comments! ;) 

Disclaimer: As I’ve said before, sometimes I just write to get things out THEN edit it after. This is the case for this one. Will probably edit this soon though! 

In the end, when Sasuke asks, Sakura says no. 

She takes his lone hand, kisses his palm and whispers why she can’t. 

Sasuke doesn’t understand but he sees the longing in her green eyes, and ah, that he understands. So he pokes her forehead, just above her seal, and hopes they meet on the road and promises a cup of tea. 

She doesn’t linger to watch him leave. Instead, the moment he turns his back, she turns hers too. One feet in front of the other, she walks through the paths of her village, through the market and takes a few turns and goes inside the Hokage tower. 

In less than an hour, Sakura files her indefinite leave with a promise to assist, help and support members of the Shinobi Alliance on her way but with no promise when she’ll come back.

Kakashi is outside when she steps out, no signs of his hat and coat but with his trademark slouch present. He must’ve jumped through the window, Sakura thinks amusedly. Somehow, even through everything, under the fading light, he still looks untouchable. Perhaps, especially now. “You going somewhere?” 

“You just approved my papers.” Sakura smiles, waving the scroll in front of him. “You know where I’m going.” 

Kakashi’s dark eyes - eyes, how odd - are unreadable as he says, “No. No, I don’t.” 

There’s much left to say, but years of cowardice and hiding are not easy habits to break. So Sakura heads home, and is gone before the sunrise. 

At the end of it all, Sakura goes on a journey to retrace her own family’s history. Beyond Konoha, beyond the Land of Fire and beyond the world of the shinobi. 

Because before Sakura was the Fifth’s Apprentice, before she was The Scorpion Killer and way before she was the leftovers of an old genin team, Sakura was a Haruno. 

And all Haruno go back to the sea. 

She left Konoha with just one bag filled with colorful clothes that she never got to wear. Clothes that her mother and father gifted her year after year, holiday after holiday, even when she couldn’t wear them. Not in the village of leaves, not when they smell of the sea even if they’ve never touched it. 

So, Haruno Sakura goes home. 

This is what Sakura tells the Godaime, the Rokudaime and anyone who asks. 

(This is what she tells herself, however, in the end, it’s still heartbreak that leads her away from Konoha. When she meets Sasuke for tea, she hopes they could talk about how Konoha broke their hearts in the way it never did to Naruto.)

All questions are quelled by a calling, by the vast distance, beyond the greens of different trees and blues of different seas tug at her heartstrings, whispering, “Darling, our darling, let us hold you.” 

Sakura circumnavigates the world and through her journey, she meets a monk, a lover and a heathen.

Suna is not known for their religious beliefs. From what she’d gathered throughout her years of friendship with Kankuro, they were pretty lenient to whatever gods their shinobi choose to worship. 

“Maybe, you know, except for another Rabbit Goddess,” Kankuro backtracked, fingers uncoordinated and stiff from fighting, trying to balance a sake cup. It was the first time they’ve seen each other after the war, on the tails still of victory and defeat. High off it. “Yup, maybe not another Rabbit Goddess, maybe not Jashin either - everything else, fair game.”

“Faith is an interesting reprieve from the terrors of life.” Gaara said, righting his brother up with his sand. His teal eyes are fond and warm, and new. His gourd is nowhere to be seen and he looks so young for a man who led their army.  “We let people have their gods.” 

Suna is not known for their religious beliefs, or rather, they’re known for not being known for it but still, it’s where Sakura meets the monk. 

Suna welcomes her with open arms because the sands may be forever shifting, but it never forgets. It remembers her as that 15 year old prodigy who saved their Kazekage’s brother, that 19, 20 and 21 year old who performed miracles in the battlefield with eyes fierce and elbows deep in people’s guts. Suna loves her for what she represents - grit, dirt and kindness honed by the cruelty of the world. 

(Abandoned. That’s what Suna and Sakura had in common.)

Sometimes, Sakura wishes she could see what they see too. 

Now, she’s 23 years old. Two years after the war and she’s still so tired. 

In Suna, she’s given free reign of the hospital. Overseeing their developments in prosthesis, their puppet corps turned into experts of the field. She supposes Sasori would be rolling in his grave at the thought of how his notes revolutionized the entire field of artificial limbs - if he had a grave that is. 

(Sasori was a brilliant man. Mad, yes, but brilliant - and aren’t the brilliant ones always are?)

When Sakura lessens her healing and caseload citing more hands-on training for the Suna medics, Gaara doesn’t ask. She’s still brilliant with her lectures and demonstration and nobody dares to question the greatest healer of the nations. 

It is on the first day of her sixth month when she sees the monk. There’s some sort of blessing ceremony to be done to the new ward of the hospital. The Kazekage’s invited the religious leaders of Suna to bless the place. 

Several came, all with different garments and different rituals. One came with water from a blessed oasis, all barefooted and with hair reaching up to the backs of their knees. They spoke a language she’s never heard, words running over like water over rocks in a bubbling stream. Another came in traditional Suna garments, and sprinkled sand over the white tiles of the new ward - under the setting sun, it looked like fairy dust and gold. 

Many came and went, but one remained still at the outskirts of the crowd, quiet and familiar.

“It’s the first time he’s gone out in public since Chiyo-baa-sama’s death,” Kankuro shrugged when Sakura asked. “He’s kind of particular and all that.” 

It isn’t until the sun dips down the horizon that the monk steps forward. At this point there aren’t anyone left but Gaara and Sakura but nevertheless, they receive no acknowledgement from the stooping man. 

He’s quiet, as he bleeds his chakra to the floor and down every grain of sand in the ward. It always amazes Sakura how chakra lives in non-combatants - a proof that it exists beyond duty. And proof that it can, perhaps, one day exist only for beauty. 

“Do you think he takes confessions?” Sakura whispers. Gaara’s lips quirk upwards, knowing that she knows the difference between a priest and a monk and yet indulges her. “Perhaps. If he does, let me know.”  They’ve all got sins to unload, Sakura muses. And yet, despite being weighed down by all the choices she’s made and been forced to make, it’s not what spills from her mouth when she finds the monk a week after. 

Or rather, he finds her. Coughing, old and sitting on her table. 

There’s something about him, lungs barely holding on and yet still at peace, old age running lines on his face that had her saying, confessing - “I believe I am lost.” 

The monk pauses, eyes torn away from the window and gravitating towards her face. Sakura doesn’t expect a response, after all, he hasn’t said a word to anyone for years. But, he shakes his naked head and offers her a smile, “Nothing is ever really lost.”

That night, she receives a missive from Konoha, like she’s been receiving for the past eleven months but this time, there are two of them. One is a response to the report she wrote about the progress of her study in prosthetics and the other, the other smelling of home and written in a piece of old weathered paper. It almost makes her smile.  Mr. Ukki misses you. 

Sakura doesn’t stay long after that. She fears that if she stays so near to home, its voice will overpower her roots’, and the sea has been waiting for her since she was born. 

She bids Suna goodbye after a year of staying within its walls. She hugs Kankuro tightly, hold Temari’s hand and kisses Gaara’s cheek. 

The Kazekage blushes underneath his hat and Kankuro jibes, “Well, if this is what farewell feels like, then you should say goodbye more often.” 

For months, Sakura moves from town to town, village to village. Occasionally receiving scrolls from Konoha, asking her to lend assistance to a new ally or an old enemy.

It’s funny, how a great military power apologizes for its sins. Never acknowledging it, never calling it reparations, preferring the term “aid” when it only ever is leverage. 

How odd. 

How hypocritical. 

(Sometimes, Sakura wonders if Uchiha Itachi was truly a loyal ninja of Konoha or if he was yet just another blinded soldier searching for idealism in a corrupted system. Was he a victim, truly? A hero? A martyr? To what end? For whom?) 

In her bones, Sakura feels time slipping faster and faster, and despite these emerging thoughts, she wonders if spring has begun in Konoha. 

She claims her free tea from Sasuke at a small town on the border of Iwakagure and Takigakure, almost half a year after she left Suna - two years into her journey. 

“You need a haircut, Sasuke-kun.” Sakura greets and watches in satisfaction as the hobo-looking man looks up to her as she sits in front of him. His hair has grown longer, covering part of his face, finally succumbing to gravity and bidding the duck-butt style goodbye. 

“Sakura.”

There’s something in the way Sasuke speaks her name. When they were kids, it’s always with dismissal and when they went on, it’s with a tone of chained fondness. During the war, it’s with disdain turned acknowledgement. 

When they were in Konoha, Sakura could swear that she could hear pride in Sasuke’s voice, hidden behind the syllables of her name. 

Here, he calls her with surprise melting into relief. Perhaps, being alone has taken a toll to her wayward teammate. 

(Here’s the difference between the two: Sasuke is looking and running from something, Sakura knows where she’s going. Whether or not she’s running or looking too is irrelevant.) (Kind of.)

“Hey, Sasuke-kun.” Sakura smiles and waves a waitress down, “Fancy a cup of tea with me?” 

Sasuke nods, his lips tugging upward. His dark eyes linger on the spider silk strands of her hair against the orange setting sun.  Her hair’s grown longer, almost as long as when they were genin. 

For a short moment, he’s filled with dread, struggling to remember what young Sakura looked like. He’s starting to forget, perhaps, and it is both a blessing and a punishment. 

The shadows shift and stretch under the guidance of the setting sun, and they exchange stories of the road until the moon nudges the sun to rest. 

It’s funny how easy they fall into bed together, right after tea. 

Sakura’s childhood dreams featured more of a courtship, a promise and a marriage. Teenage Sakura’s fantasy featured more heated kisses, a fight and a leveling of a forest in rage turned lust. 

But this, this is so much better. 

Sasuke touches her with surprising gentleness and want, after they trip their way to his accommodations. There’s a softness in the firm kisses of his mouth, a tremble playing at the edge of his fingertips. It’s not a battle, or a dance but rather an introduction. A hello followed by oh... gods, yes, there -- 

Sasuke makes it good, despite only having one arm, it must be an Uchiha thing to be so good at everything, Sakura thinks as she lay beside her former team mate. 

In a different life, perhaps, she would’ve married Sasuke, she thinks as she watches his lashes flutter as he sleeps. Perhaps, she would’ve give him a child, a girl with his eyes and her hair. A pink-haired Uchiha. But this is not that lifetime. 

Instead, Sakura meets Sasuke again - or perhaps for the very first time - as a lover. Washed anew by his journey, Sakura gets to know her former teammate as a man who can reel out moans and gasps from her, who can, after they decided to travel together for a while, and will start a fire to keep her warm and will tease her about her love affair when he reads Kakashi’s letter over her shoulder.  “Was he the reason why you didn’t come with me?” Sasuke asks. They’re in the Land of Snow, farther from where Sakura really aims to go, but she’s got time to spare and Sasuke might actually be killed by the Raikage if he’s found shuffling around near their country without an escort.  Sakura glances at the words written on the wrinkled parchment (Naruto’s taking classes with Shikamaru. Lots of reading for him to do. He tried using Kage Bunshin to study and knocked himself out. Time is of the essence, he said, and I agree.) and pinches that flicker of hope budding in her chest. 

She shrugs at Sasuke’s question, “I think... I think I wouldn’t have gone with you even without him in the picture.”  Something sad flickers in Sasuke’s eyes before it’s gone, “And yet, here we are.”

“Here we are.” 

In the frigid cold of the snow, Sasuke moves against Sakura as an apology and a goodbye. It’s more than comrades sharing warmth but less than lovers making love. At the back of Sakura’s mind, she wonders if Kakashi knows - if he’s angry or if, like always, he understands.  (She misses him, even when they’ve never had each other like this. But the intimacy of sex is trumped by the intimacy in battle, in handling each other with precious care, scars and blood be damned. It is an intimacy borne of desperation, fostered by respect, watered with fondness -- and killed out of love. She misses him, but time is of the essence.) 

Sasuke and Sakura split up at the outskirts of the Land of Stone at the start of her third year of travelling. He went East, she went West and that was that. A few days in, Sakura enters Asakura.  Asakura is the city of heathens - prostitutions, gambling, and underground dealing. It’s the city of sin, which means, it’s also the land of base instincts and humanity stripped to its bare bones. 

It seems like a city just right up her shishou’s alley. Sakura only had to follow the sounds of bellowing, of bodies of men flying out of tavern, and murmurs about a (beautiful but) crazy bitch burning through her own money to find Tsunade. 

News of another jinchuuriki kage reaches her ears too, but she brushes it away.  It’s been three years since she last saw her shishou and in the dim lights of the tavern, she’s glad to see her as youthful as ever, and tries to erase the image of her wan, old, and dying. 

It is only after Tsunade wins that Sakura approaches with a bottle of sake on hand. 

Glancing down at the large money of pot she just won, Tsunade’s heart pounds hard looking at the girl she broke and trained and broke again until she remade herself - her daughter in all but name - and chokes, joking, “Are you dying?”

When her girl smiles, all calm and accepting, and raises a bottle of the most expensive sake Tsunade ever tasted, something inside the old Senju crumbles.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Oh Sakura, what have you done?”

Tsunade’s hands are shaking, the fading glow of her uselessness mocking her in the darkness of Sakura’s rented room. 

“Everything, shishou. I’ve done everything. I’ve read every book, prayed to every god--”

“God? What good is a god?”  

Initially, Tsunade refuses to let her go. Forces Sakura to stay put with the same glint in her eyes when she taught the kid how to dodge, but it seemed the Slug Princess taught her too well. 

Because after the barbs, sarcasm and nights of getting way too drunk off the pots of money Tsunade continues to win, Sakura says goodbye. 

And Tsunade, not as bitter as she would’ve been, lets her go, and curses the gods for not taking her instead - because hasn’t she witnessed to many deaths already? 

It’s at the fourth year of her journey does Sakura finally lays her eyes on the blue of seas at the border of the old Whirlpool lands. The calling is silent now that she’s come. 

She sheds her old life -  her headband, her gloves and her boots and brings out the vibrantly colored fabrics from her parents. It’s silk against her pinkened skin, and the sand is warm against her feet. 

It feels like a hug and a song of - “Darling, our darling, let us hold you.”

Kakashi writes to her and Sakura doesn’t answer with a letter of her own. 

Instead, she sends Kakashi eel that she herself smoked, a small vial of pink sand and a kiss on a card.

That night, she dances under the moonlight like a flickering moth around the pyre she built. 

The oceans sings for her and she is home. 

After that, there’s no more letters from Konoha. 

In the middle of the fourth year of her journey and the year mark of her semi-permanent residence by the seas at the border of the old Whirlpool lands, Ino visits her. Ino, with her platinum blond hair arrives, still beautiful even with sweat dripping off her.

It takes three days of sunbathing, flower weaving and rebuilding of an old friendship before Ino asks her to come home.

“Haven’t you been away for far too long?” Ino asks, quiet and grown. The days of high-pitch screams and name-calling seems so far away from this little shack by the sea, in this little life her best friend built for herself. 

They’ve spoken of their friends - Naruto’s marriage, Shikamaru’s courtship fo Temari, Ino’s love with Sai and they laughed like bells but Ino didn’t find an ounce of longing in her friend’s eyes, and she already knew she has lost. 

Sakura looks to the shore, there’s a storm coming and hums, “Perhaps.” 

The last letter she receives from Konoha is not a letter at all.

It’s a missive, an invitation - for the Rokudaime’s retirement and the Nanadaime’s ascension.

“God? What good is a god?” 

Who knows? For believers, gods are good for much but--

Because Sakura is not a reincarnation of a god, when she touched Kaguya with her fist glowing green and blue, Sakura touched something not human.

And it touched her back. 

A year into the peace, it rooted deep inside her bones, a poison of the gods against humans brave and stupid enough to lay hands on them. 

It doesn’t take long for Sakura to understand her predicament. She was rotting inside out. Her chakra is poisoning her organs, taking bits off her little by little and so she left Konoha. In leaving, she left what was blossoming between her and Kakashi too in hopes that perhaps she could spare him from this pain.  

But also, she left for this: the sea, the calling and the sand under her feet, and the presence drawing near. 

On the last day of her journey, five years after she left, with her life force draining and yet stretching still - holding on, waiting, the Rokudaime, Kakashi, the man of a thousand jutsu, her lover, her love - arrives on the shores of this little island west of Whirlpool. 

He is older, of course he is. But still, Sakura runs towards him and he, mask pulled down, feet bare and eyes warm - finally free-, takes the last step and meets her halfway. (There’s still much left to say, but they’ve had years of dealing with cowardice and hiding that they’re laughingly easy habits to break.)