Celestial Bodies

Klayter McCabe

000

Sakura is not a celestial body. In her world, Naruto is the sun and Sasuke is the moon, and she is only a very small part of the universe.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a very long time, Sasuke was her sun, and she revolved around him on a deeper level than she likes to admit.

Before that, her sun was Ino.

Now, where perhaps there should be Tsunade-sensei or Lee-kun, there is only Naruto’s idiot face and shock of blond hair and promises that he’ll die to keep.

She’s not in love with him. Not the way that he looks at her when her back is turned and wants her to be.

She’s not in love with him. Not the way that, in one stupid moment, she would have forsaken everything she loved and followed Sasuke to the Sound.

She’s not in love with him. Not the way that, when they were children, Ino could step onto the playground and wave her hand and everyone would shut up, as though she were going to say something important.

She’s not in love with him. Not even the way that, sometimes when night falls, she and Lee-kun find themselves inexplicably in the same place, and they hold each other so carefully, because they’re both strong enough to break.

It doesn’t matter that most of the village is stupid, that to the adults Naruto is a monster and to the children he’s dead-last. With the exception of Nara Shikamaru, Sakura is the smartest shinobi she knows, and if her mind tells her that Naruto is a hero, that Naruto is the sun, she has no reason to question it.

When Sasuke was the sun, she wrote him poetry. Poetry. She still has some of it. Not because she would ever give it to him (she hadn’t been brave or stupid enough to give him poetry even when her crush had been at its most ridiculous zenith), but because when she holds it in her hands and reads her inelegant rhymes, it helps her to remember better times. The days when Sasuke was Sasuke without being Orochimaru, before Naruto followed Jiraiya-sama out of Konoha, before she became Tsunade-sensei’s apprentice.

She thinks, that when she wrote that poetry, she was a child. Never mind that she was a kunoichi who had killed men, she was a child.

What right had Orochi-fucking-maru had to come along and claim Sasuke as his own, Sasuke who was her sun? Because wherever Orochimaru went, eventually his team would follow, no matter how many decades it had been since they were a team. What right had Orochimaru had to decide that Sasuke was his, and why had Jiraiya-sama and Tsunade-sensei had to follow suit with Naruto and herself?

Because they had to.

She reads scrolls from the Hokage’s library, legends and techniques and histories, and nothing in them says anything about this, about the inevitability of history repeating itself.

Sakura refuses to believe in inevitability. Sasuke had a fucking choice before he ran off to join Orochimaru. He’s always had a choice, and he’s always picked Itachi. It doesn’t matter how many years may pass, Sasuke will always be five-years-old, trying desperately to please his father and equal his brother and live up to his mother’s sweetly expectant smile. Sakura knows all this without knowing it. Sasuke is infinitely less mature than Naruto, because Naruto grows. He learns and changes and grows stronger and (although it’s not really an adjective she can properly apply to Naruto) wiser. Sasuke gets stronger, but his brain is static.

Kill Itachi, it says. Be the best. Don’t let them touch you.

She spent too much time desperately wanting Sasuke not to have at least a vague idea of how his mind works.

Sasuke. Her second sun. Only Naruto has more gravity.

Naruto.

Uzumaki Naruto.

Ino was her first sun. Yamanaka Ino, who found a little girl with pink hair, a little girl from a family of inept shinobi, who believed that the trait that would most influence her life was going to be the size of her forehead.

Ino was the first person to ever make Sakura believe that she could be strong. Ino, who, when they were small and Sakura loved her, was the most perfect kunoichi there could be. Yamanaka Ino was equally at home arranging flowers and jumping from trees flinging shuriken, equally at home flirting with boys twice her age and holding kunai to the throats of men.

Ino taught Sakura about strength long before Naruto or Sasuke or Rock Lee came along to offer a refresher course.

Sakura remembers being eight-years-old, wearing Ino’s ribbon in her hair and clumsily pressing her lips to Ino’s cheek, because Ino was her best friend and she loved her more than anyone and that was what best friends did.

She still remembers the expression on Ino’s face when she announced that she had a crush on a boy. All the other girls had crushes on boys. Even Ino said that she had one, though she’d giggled and never told Sakura who it was. Sakura hadn’t understood that, to Ino, boys were only a game. That to Ino, Sakura wasn’t allowed to have a crush on a boy. That Ino considered herself to be Sakura’s boy. It wasn’t something she’d understood until much, much too late, after Ino had fought back the only way she could, and for the first year, love-of-Sasuke had been nothing but a ball that they threw back and forth at each other’s heads.

And so what started as a mistake became a long, complicated fight, and somewhere along the way Sakura forgot why it had began and fell in love with Sasuke after all, stupid fucking Sasuke, and part of her loves him still.

Ino isn’t the girl she used to be, anymore than Sakura is. They still see each other all the time, and now that Sasuke is gone things are different all over again. They’re building from the ground up, but changed. Ino no longer wants to be Sakura’s boy, and even if she did, Sakura would no longer let her. It’s not that she doesn’t love Ino. She does.

She does.

It’s that Sakura never wants a boy again. Never wants to have to depend on someone else. She wants love, someday (of course she does, because she’s nothing but a stupid little girl, a stupid little girl who still spends too much styling her hair, and all stupid little girls want handsome princes to carry them away), but not until she’s ready for it. Sakura has to deem herself strong enough before she can love again, strong enough not only to protect herself, but everyone else as well.

She needs to be strong enough to protect Ino, even though Ino doesn’t believe that she needs anyone’s protection.

She needs to be strong enough to protect Sasuke, because if anyone’s ever needed saving, it’s obvious that he does.

She needs to be strong enough to protect Naruto from the fox, and Naruto is the only one who’s ever grateful.

Naruto.

It kills her, how much she loves him. She doesn’t know when it happened. The exact moment isn’t obvious, the way it was for Ino and Sasuke. Naruto wormed his way in to the heart that she’d tried to board up against all new intruders. He must have left a path in his wake, for Lee to follow.

Rock Lee isn’t one of her suns, he never will be, but she loves him just the same. She’s grown fond of the way he’s a caricature of a warrior, of his stupid green spandex, of his ridiculous dedication to his teacher. She’s to the point now, that if Lee actually did something about his ferocious eyebrows, she’d be disappointed.

All of her loves are very confusing people.

Ino, with all her strength and pride, who went from an incredible child to an empty-headed teenager and is now growing into a beautiful, competent woman. A true kunoichi.

Lee, since the first time he blew her kisses and struck his “nice guy” pose. The first time he promised, in the way that only children can, to be there for her whenever she needed him. The way he meant it then, and still means it now.

Sasuke, the stupid fuck who betrayed them all. Sasuke, who has been too wrapped up in himself for all this time to know that there are people who care about him.

Naruto. With his relentless “Sakura-chan!” and “Sasuke-teme!” Her third sun revolving around her second, because what they are is something more and less than she could name.

Kunoichi are taught about sex at a much earlier age and much more in-depth than their male counterparts. For male shinobi, sex is something that should be gotten out of their systems and not allowed to interfere with missions. For kunoichi, sex is just another weapon.

That extra training always made her wonder, during Naruto and Sasuke’s fights. Half the time they might as well have been fucking. It’s not a thought she’s ever shared with anyone (the look on Naruto’s face if she were to say something like that), but it still lingers in the back of her mind.

Just as she loves Naruto and Sasuke in different ways, so they must care about each other in ways different than they care about her.

Naruto, pleading with his eyes.

Sasuke, blank as paper, but hands so careful on the few occasions that they touched her.

The two of them beating the fuck out of each other with those awful grins.

Ino, bossing Shikamaru and Chouji around, because she loves them.

Lee deferring to Neji with that look burning in his eyes, guarding Tenten’s back as they fight. Because, in a way that he could express only with actions, he loves them.

Tsunade-sensei and Jiraiya-sama, still chasing that snake-faced bastard after all this time.

Kakashi. She’s seen the two framed pictures over his bed. Kakashi, with his mask pulled up over his nose and his left-eye, courtesy of Sasuke’s dead clan, well covered. Kakashi, who lives alone in a small apartment, whose best friends are the dogs he summons. Sakura knows that everyone from Kakashi’s team is dead.

Shinobi lead complicated lives.

As time moves inevitably forward, Sakura is determined to keep her suns burning bright. Because they are hers. Because she loves them.

Because she knows that every time Tsunade-sensei looks at her, she sees only herself, and Sakura always wants to yell, “I am not you!” until she can make her Hokage believe it.

Because she is not Tsunade, and Sasuke is not Orochimaru, and Naruto is not Jiraiya.

They are their own people.

And she’s going to prove it.

God damn it, she’s going to prove it.

000

End “Celestial Bodies”

000

June 17, 2005